When I learn about yet another book regarding fictional magic schools, I experience a vast sea of ennui. The literary shelves have been inundated with them, so many trying to emulate J.K. Rowling’s roaring success with her HP novels. So this story of a one-to-one relationship of a sorcerer to an apprentice mildly intrigued me at first. Then I was roped in and reading avidly before I knew that I’d been ensnared.
Tabatha Zeng is a cunning wench, parlaying her image as the Perfect Asian Daughter (author’s capitalization not mine) into studying with the famous Sorcerer Julian Solomon. There’s a fair bit of humor at play here: her name looks like one belonging to a feline familiar and his evokes the legendary wise sorcerer/king. But, when he predicts his own death, you sit up and pay attention.
This fictional world meshes the mundane and the magical. Ordinary people are aware of sorcerers, conjurers and prophets. Some are eager to become part of that world; others are decidedly wary. Bored high school girls play Ouija at slumber parties not for kicks but as practice for introduction into sorcery.
The story is told in Tabatha’s own voice as she attempts to wrangle sense in a profession that has people tangling past, present and future. She’s clearly smart, articulate and well trained. It’s tough to believe that she’s mediocre in regular scholastic studies when she uses words like “vagaries”, “eccentric”, “damnable”, “gauche” and “embittered”, et al. (Golly, I adore elevated vocabulary in fictional adolescents. It’s SO unusual!) Sorcerer Solomon even taught her how to detect spoken lies...and apparently how to tell convincing ones. (That’s an actual scholastic topic. Cute, that.) You can tell both will prove useful skills in the days to come.
Clearly, she’ll need all her wits about her after Solomon’s predicted—and very messy—death comes true and she goes on the run to escape his terrifying ex-wife Angelique Reed and fulfill her promise to her dead former employer. I’m rooting for her and eager to read more about her crime-solving exploits.
Tabatha Zeng is a cunning wench, parlaying her image as the Perfect Asian Daughter (author’s capitalization not mine) into studying with the famous Sorcerer Julian Solomon. There’s a fair bit of humor at play here: her name looks like one belonging to a feline familiar and his evokes the legendary wise sorcerer/king. But, when he predicts his own death, you sit up and pay attention.
This fictional world meshes the mundane and the magical. Ordinary people are aware of sorcerers, conjurers and prophets. Some are eager to become part of that world; others are decidedly wary. Bored high school girls play Ouija at slumber parties not for kicks but as practice for introduction into sorcery.
The story is told in Tabatha’s own voice as she attempts to wrangle sense in a profession that has people tangling past, present and future. She’s clearly smart, articulate and well trained. It’s tough to believe that she’s mediocre in regular scholastic studies when she uses words like “vagaries”, “eccentric”, “damnable”, “gauche” and “embittered”, et al. (Golly, I adore elevated vocabulary in fictional adolescents. It’s SO unusual!) Sorcerer Solomon even taught her how to detect spoken lies...and apparently how to tell convincing ones. (That’s an actual scholastic topic. Cute, that.) You can tell both will prove useful skills in the days to come.
Clearly, she’ll need all her wits about her after Solomon’s predicted—and very messy—death comes true and she goes on the run to escape his terrifying ex-wife Angelique Reed and fulfill her promise to her dead former employer. I’m rooting for her and eager to read more about her crime-solving exploits.